The Gorilla Diet: Biology-Based Nutrition For Optimal Health

Not enough people are talking about biology-based nutrition and what it takes to truly achieve optimal health. 

If you want to feel like a gorilla you have to eat like one.

This is what one of my mentors told me over a decade ago and I didn’t really understand until a few years ago, when I began researching the links between diet and physiology.

In school we’re not really taught much about how animal diets are dependent on biology. Animals have all evolved along specific lines to find, hunt, and extract the optimal nutrients from the world around them based on their physiology.

In other words, what you see when you look at the physiology of an animal is the product of a millions-years long relationship between them and their nature habitat and diet.

Humans are of course just another animal. It is extreme folly to ever think we could decide what our optimal diets are based on arbitrary preferences and beliefs.

Physiology alone decides what is best for us to eat. This is because it is the one revealing factor that shows us what we evolved to extract our optimal nutrition from over the course of millions of years.

Homo sapiens is a frugivore through and through, much like their cousins in the ape family, including chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas.

We cannot escape our biology, no matter how much we try, and no matter how many crackpot scientists, dietary “experts”, and propaganda outlets say otherwise.

Accepting our biology means giving our bodies what they crave and deserve: plants.

You Are Not Designed to Eat Meat

And neither are gorillas.

Actually, gorillas primarily extract nutrients from the tender shoots of green leafy vegetation, and from fruits.

They will occasionally partake of meat, in the form of termites, as well.

On rare occasions, they may even eat a small bird or other small animal. Typically this kind of behavior is indicative of improper nutrition and lack of available food in their environment.

Bonobos eat even less animal protein than gorillas do, and we are more closely biologically related to them in terms of dietary needs.

Meat makes up less than 5% of the typical diet of a gorilla. It’s less than 2% or so for the bonobo.

These powerful, graceful, stunning relatives of ours simply do not eat meat. At least in the way humans currently do.

The problem here is that humans never developed any of the biological adaptations necessary in order to properly consume and digest meat.

In the wild, we would be hard pressed to catch a bird or other small animal with our bare hands, let alone try and take down a bovine or hog.

Similarly, there’s no way we could bite into the hides of these animals, dig our snouts in their bloody organs, crunch their bones up to extract the marrow, and lap up the blood that pools inside and around the corpse.

Gorillas simply do not engage in this behavior. They aren’t biologically suited to do so.

And neither are we.

Humans Evolved For Plant-Based Nutrition

We have perfectly-sized hands with opposable thumbs for grasping fruit, jaws with lateral movement to grind foliage like all the other herbivores and frugivores (a trait carnivores and omnivores lack), a medium-long intestine that isn’t built to allow meat to pass through quickly (which causes putrefaction and inflammation), large salivary glands like our herbivore brethren, and sweat glands all over our body just like frugivores and herbivores.

We lack claws or fangs or any kind of offensive adaptation for hunting and catching prey, and we cannot digest or thrive off of raw meat. We lack the stomach acid to kill all the bacteria in raw flesh, and would become deathly ill and even die from this alone, let alone all the other meat and dairy related illnesses that exist.

More importantly than all this, we simply can’t make use of most nutrients that come from meat.

Contrary to popular belief, you can’t just stick anything in your mouth, swallow it, and expect to extract nutrients from it.

It would be like expecting a molecular biologist to “extract” bones on an archeological dig, or expect an archeologist to properly “extract” a specimen found on a deep sea dive. These practices are similar in theory, but the tools just aren’t there, and neither is the knowledge.

Well, animal bodies work much in the same way.

When you eat meat, your body is tasked with digesting it. This is not an easy feat for an animal that lacks the biological tools for digesting meat (acidic saliva, highly acidic stomach acid, short intestines, small colon, etc.).

What happens, is that most of the nutrients that are in meat simply don’t get absorbed by the body. What does get absorbed, causes inflammation and disease.

In small amounts, meat is not dangerous for the average plant eater. Indeed, even horses and deer (full herbivores) have been known to chow down on a bug or bird once in a blue moon.

Problems arise when meat is eaten every day for years, and not the meat we’re suited to eat at that.

If we were in the wild, the only “meat” we would be eating are bugs, which have extremely low fat content. Occasionally shellfish and birds would likely be on the menu as well.

One small bird or a handful of crickets every few months is not going to harm your body. Your cells will look at it for what it is (foreign biological matter), extract some nutrients from it that may be harder to come by from vegetation alone, and move on.

Overwhelmingly, however, we are supposed to be getting the majority of our nutrition from fruits and vegetables.

This fact is one reason why professional athletes everywhere are making the switch to veganism or at least incorporating far more vegetables and fruits in their diets. Nutrient absorption is a huge factor in health and athletic performance, and plant-based nutrients are simply far easier for humans to digest and utilize.

The truth is, our education system and society in general has done a very poor job of teaching people about diet and biology.

That we’re biologically “designed” to eat plants should be household knowledge, but instead it comes across as sounding like something you would hear from a sage living in the wilderness of Tibet or something.

As they say, these days common sense isn’t very common.

It should go without saying that in the wild, you would never be able to tackle a cow to the ground, and dig your mouth into its hide, rip off its muscle, chew it, and eat it.

That’s a fantasy.

To say nothing of the fact that if you were able to actually accomplish this, the chances that you would throw it back up or get violently ill are extremely high.

The most meat any of us would be eating would be beetles and shellfish, and even this would be risky.

In terms of our physiology, if it means anything at all, we’re supposed to be even more “plant based” than the bonobo.

Humans are not carnivorous. We don’t have a carnivorous instinct or bone in our body.

For most of the population, the sight of small furry animals evicts feelings of warmth and companionship. 

Those aren’t the instincts of a carnivore or omnivore. Bears don’t look at cats and rabbits and go “awww…”

You’re not a meat eater. Stop pretending and living out a fantasy.

If you want optimal health, it’s time to go back to your biological roots and start eating like a gorilla.

The Gorilla Diet

Roughly 65% of a gorilla diet consists of fruit.

Those giant muscles you see weren’t built with termites, that’s for sure.

Optimal nutrition, including the protein needed to build muscle, is found in fruit.

Fruit is considered by sages and holistic health practitioners to be the highest form of food, because it is designed specifically by plants to be consumed by animals.

This means it is calibrated for our bodies to provide us nutrients, alkalinize our body, heal us, regulate us, aid our digestion, and overall allow us to subsist.

Animals, growing strong off the fruit of the surrounding plants of their environment, live long healthy lives and procreate, helping to spread the seeds of the plant and thus propagate them.

For much of the plant kingdom, healthy happy mammals means healthy happy plants. It’s a grand symbiotic relationship.

Carnivores are a different type of creature, designed to form a symbiotic relationship with other animals to cull their weak and sick, in order to strengthen their gene pool. They also act as nature’s clean up crew, eating the dead (necrovores).

Humans do not fall into this category at all. Our relationship and bond is to the trees and bushes of the Earth, that provide us high vibrational fruits and berries.

So over half of the gorilla’s diet is fruit, many species of which we can’t get in stores and are hardly classified. What we do know is that tropical and sub-tropical fruit is most like the kinds of fare that our gorilla cousins consume.

This would include bananas, dates, oranges, pineapples, coconuts, guava, passion fruit, starfruit, mangoes, kiwi, acai, and papayas. Because they are highly alkaline and are excellent sources of vitamins, we would add watermelon to this list.

The next 15% – 20% of the gorilla diet is in leaves and vegetation.

For us, this would include kale, spinach, dandelion, bamboo shoots, peas, string beans, inner bark, peppers, and the like.

The rest of the gorilla diet consists of root foods and flowers, with a small percent (less than 5%) for termites and grubs.

Root foods and legumes are important for us because much like termites for apes, they are the means by which frugivores get hard to obtain nutrients.

For us, foods like peanuts, chickpeas, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, lentils, radishes, turnips, and similar foods, are rich in protein, folate, copper, manganese, iron, and other alkaline phytonutrients. The dirt that often accompanies these foods also contains much needed B12.

When a gorilla is in its natural habitat and feels the biological urge for a certain nutrient, it will naturally seek out what’s available. Often, termites and protein-rich bugs are there for the taking, but they will still go out of their way to dig for roots and tubers, because phytonutrients are more biologically valuable and useful than what can be extracted from a termite.

Flowers also provide somewhat different phytonutrients, and make no mistake, many are perfectly edible for us and provide excellent nutrition.

The mighty Silverback didn’t evolve eating cows and pigs. It evolved eating tropical fruits, tender leaves, and roots. Just as we did.

If you want to optimize your health and really break the cycle of doctor visits, expensive and dangerous medication, and constant illness and discomfort, follow in the footsteps of our cousins in nature.

They never abandoned their biology.